Try Me
I’ve worked overnights at a Halloween pop-up since the last week of August. It’s one of those seasonal stores that moves into a dead big-box space for ten weeks and then vanishes like it was never there. Ours is in an old furniture store in a strip mall off Sprague, between a vape shop and a place that does eyebrows. Sixteen bucks an hour, ten to six, five nights a week. I stock, I face the shelves, I fix whatever the customers wrecked, and I sweep up about a pound of fake blood glitter a night.
The store manager is a woman named Dee who has done eleven seasons at three different locations and talks like a flight attendant who has seen a plane go down. On my first night she walked me through the closing list. Most of it was normal. Lock the fitting rooms. Run the floor scrubber. Don’t let anyone from the eyebrow place use our bathroom.
The last item on the list was the animatronics.
We had fourteen of them on the floor that year, the big ones, five and six feet tall, on black platforms along the back wall under a banner that said TRY ME! Each one has a pressure pad or a big red button, and when a kid steps on it the thing lurches and screams and its eyes light up. The Groundskeeper with the shovel. The Twins. The Scarecrow on the pole. The Hanging Bride. You know the kind.
Dee’s rule was: at close, every animatronic gets unplugged at the wall, not just switched off. Then you count them against the floor sheet, which is a laminated page with fourteen names and fourteen little boxes, and you initial it.
“Why unplugged?” I asked.
“Because the timers on the cheap ones go off at random and the alarm company charges us for false alarms,” she said. Then, after a second: “And count them. Every night. Count them, initial it.”
I didn’t ask why counting mattered. You don’t, on a seasonal job. You do the list.
The first wrong thing was on October 9th.
I unplugged them, walked the wall with the sheet, and counted fifteen.
I figured I’d counted the Twins as two. They’re one unit, two kids in matching dresses on one platform, and the sheet lists them as one. So I counted again, slower, touching each platform with my clipboard. Fifteen.
The extra one was at the very end, past the Bride, half in the shadow of the endcap with the fog juice. A man in a work shirt and jeans, sort of hunched, with a cheap latex face that didn’t look like anything. No name on the platform. No price sign. No cord. I looked behind it for a plug and there wasn’t even a socket on the base, just smooth black plastic.
It had a red TRY ME button on a little post in front of it like all the others.
I did not press it. I want that on record. I wrote “15?” in the margin of the sheet and put it on Dee’s desk.
The next night the sheet was back on its hook with my note crossed out. Dee had written “14” next to it and circled it, hard enough to dent the lamination.
I counted at close. Fourteen. I counted again. Fourteen. The end of the row was just the Bride and then the fog juice.
It came back on the 14th. And on the 17th. And on the 20th.
Every time, it was standing somewhere slightly different. Not a lot. A platform’s width. On the 17th it was between the Scarecrow and the Bride, as if it had always been in the lineup, and I almost didn’t catch it, because I’d started counting fast. On the 20th it was facing the other way, toward the back hallway where the stockroom and the time clock are.
Every time, the next night, there were fourteen again.
I stopped writing it on the sheet. I know how that sounds. But Dee had made it pretty clear, without saying anything, that she didn’t want it on the sheet. So I’d count fifteen, initial for fourteen, and go scrub the floor with my back to the wall where I could see all of them in the security monitor by the registers.
The thing about the security monitor is that it shows sixteen camera views in a little grid, and the back wall is in the top right corner, and the image is about the size of a playing card. You can’t see much. You can see enough to know if something moved.
It never moved while I was watching. I watched a lot.
On the 26th it was in the back hallway.
Not on the floor with the others. Standing on its platform right next to the time clock, close enough that I’d have had to reach past it to punch out. I don’t know how long it had been there. I’d been in the stockroom breaking down boxes for two hours with my earbuds in.
Up close the latex face was worse. It wasn’t a face, exactly. It was the idea of a face, the way a kid draws one, two holes and a line. The work shirt had a name patch over the pocket, the oval kind that’s stitched on. I didn’t read it. I took my earbuds out and stood there and decided I was not going to read it.
The red button was right at hip height, on its little post.
That’s when it said my name.
Not loud. It was the same tinny speaker voice all of them have, that cheap blown-out sound. It said my first name, and then it said “ten to six,” like it was reading it off a schedule, and then it said “try me.”
The button wasn’t pressed. I was standing a full step away from it. There is no cord. I checked again later, with a flashlight, with my phone camera, with my hand. There is no cord and no battery door and nowhere to put one.
I clocked out on my phone app, which you’re technically not supposed to do, and I went out the front and sat in my car with the doors locked until the opening crew came at 6:40.
When I went back in that night, there were fourteen.
I told Dee. All of it. She listened the way she listens to customers who want to return a costume they obviously wore to a party.
When I finished she said, “Did you press it?”
I said no.
She said, “Good.” She took the laminated sheet off the hook and turned it over. On the back, in dry-erase marker, there were columns of tally marks, years of them, wiped and rewritten so many times the lamination was cloudy. At the bottom of each column there was a name, and next to most of the names someone had written a date, all in late October or the first two days of November.
“Teardown is November 2nd,” Dee said. “Everything goes back to the warehouse in Ohio, everything gets counted on the truck, fourteen units. Just get to November 2nd.”
I asked her what happened to the people with dates next to their names.
She said they quit. Seasonal people quit all the time.
Then she wrote my name at the bottom of a new column and handed the sheet back to me.
It’s October 30th. I’m writing this in my car in my apartment’s parking lot, a little before six in the morning.
Last night I counted fourteen on the back wall. That should have been good news. I’ve been at the store long enough to know it wasn’t.
When I came home, there was a box on my front step. Big, the kind the animatronics ship in, with the store’s logo and a warehouse barcode and THIS SIDE UP. The return label is already filled in, addressed to the warehouse in Ohio, in handwriting I’m pretty sure is mine.
The box is open at the top. It’s empty.
There’s a red light on in my living room, at about hip height. I can see it through the blinds from here. It isn’t blinking. It’s just on, steady, waiting for somebody to try it.
If you work at one of those stores this year, count them. Every night. And if there’s one at the end with no cord and no name on the platform, don’t read the patch on its shirt.
I read it, eventually. On the 27th. It’s my name.
AI was involved in writing this story.
